Microsoft Adcenter takes a stance on Trademark Terms and Bidding

3 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on August 30, 2007 in Affiliate Information, PPC, MSN Search  

To my surprise and delight I got an email from MSN adcenter today concerning bidding and using trademark terms. (cough Google… I hope your listening) The stance from my point of view is in favor of publishers and puts the responsibility where it is back on the trademark owners and not using the Search engines to police their trademark for them. The Official email:

Microsoft adCenter is changing the way we manage our trademark policy starting September 10, 2007. While no change will be made to the trademark policy itself, this update aligns better with marketplace practices, speeds up editorial review to get your ads live faster, and ensures consumers see relevant ads.

Microsoft adCenter’s Trademark Policy

As stated above, we are not changing the trademark policy itself. You may still use trademarked terms
in your ads  when you, as the advertiser, are the owner of the trademark, an affiliate or reseller of trademarked products or services, or a site that uses the trademarked term in an informational,
descriptive, or non-competitive manner. Infringing use of trademark terms by direct competitors remains a violation of Microsoft adCenter policies. 

What’s changing?

It will now be the advertiser’s responsibility to obtain permission from the trademark owner to use a trademarked term in their ads. It will also be the trademark owner’s responsibility to address ongoing
incorrect usage of their trademark term(s) directly with third-party advertisers.  Microsoft adCenter will no longer intercede to obtain permission for the advertiser wanting to use a trademarked term. 

What does this mean for my search advertising?

Your ads may display next to other ads that contain your trademarked terms.
Affiliates, resellers, and third parties may show up against queries for your trademarked terms.
Competitor’s ads may show up in search results against queries for trademarks in certain scenarios, due to match types other than exact.

For example, if a generic term is included in the overall search query, advertisers who bid on the generic term may show up in the search results.

If you are a trademark owner and you believe your trademark is being misused in Microsoft adCenter, you can submit a report by following the instructions on our Trademark Concern Form.

Sounds like good news for publishers/affiliates when it comes to bidding on trademark terms. While I agree using trademark terms without persmission is bad but there is no reason that for instance a Target ad shouldn’t show up when someone is searching for Wal-mart.

Affiliate Account Managers a Dime a Dozen or Worth their Weight in gold?

6 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on August 27, 2007 in Affiliate Networks, Affiliate Managers  

Anyone starting in Affiliate marketing or those that have been through the ringer know that there are some good affiliate managers and there are some bad affiliate managers. The key is when you find a good one hold onto them.  Personally Affiliate Account Managers (AM) can be well worth their weight in gold!

First, a good AM doesn’t just look out for the company they work for they find ways for you to grow and earn more. I mean common the more you earn the more they earn. This means they don’t just send you generic emails saying try this offer but try to find offers that will work well with what you are already pushing or even a new hot offer out the gates so you can jump on it.

Second, a good AM WILL bump your payout on an offer. Yes they have limitations as to what they can do but there isn’t a single offer that I have ever come across that I couldn’t get a bump on. A real good AM looks for ways to bump you even at times to help you succeed above the rest.  One instance is I was promoting an offer and doing well. It got completely pulled but the network had a similar offer from another company. To make up for the unexpected pull I got the top payout for that offer and in turn I slammed it hard and made the Network, the Merchant and Myself a nice chink of change.

Thirdly, a good AM will communicate with you. If you have had an am for more than two weeks and you haven’t gotten an email, aim or phone call you should worry. One of two things is happening. Either they are on coast and don’t care or they are working heavily with the affiliates they already have and don’t have much time for you. THAT MEANS REQUEST A NEW AM and do it NOW! 

Lastly, how do you know you got a bad AM? They rarely communicate with you. They rarely bump you without you asking or give you the run around when you ask for a bump.  You never hear about new offers that are out or ones coming up the pipeline. You gain no value from the relationship with them except more “spam” in your Inbox. THAT MEANS REQUEST A NEW AM and do it NOW!

Remember with Account Managers it is in the best interest for both you and them that you make more money. But remember it is a two way street, you can’t ignore an account manager and then expect them to give you a bump or some hot offers. 

A Revolution Coming to Wordpress

3 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on August 23, 2007 in Working Online  

A Revolution Theme has come to Word Press. Many of us out there love to utilize wordpress for our blogs but even our sites. Well this theme is kicking it when it comes to making your blog style and design look a “website”. While the theme isn’t free it is cheap $59.95 and you gain access to all the future updates of the design. Plus the design is taking requests for what people would like the theme to be, able to do and look like. Straight from the developers site:

Why You Should Use the Revolution Theme

Revolution is user friendly, customizable theme that is an ideal solution for online magazines, online newspapers, and other websites that wish to use WordPress as a content management system. Custom themes can easily cost you more than $1000, so the $59.95 is a steal!

So If you utilize wordpress then I suggest you check out the Revolution Theme. I will be putting it to use on a few future projects :).

Why Not Tracking Your Campaigns can Cost you Money!

6 People Speaking Their Mind - Put In Your Two Cents!

Posted on August 22, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, PPC, Yahoo Search Marketing  

You can read everywhere that people suggest you track you campaigns and statistics, even on this blog. Meaning not relying on Google, Yahoo, Msn or other networks to rely on them to send you just the country or target traffic you are paying for.  There are many programs out there that you can pay for that will track the IP’s of your visitors and be able to tag to a certain campaign, or you can have one built. I personally had one built for me as the ones out there worked but I couldn’t get the information I wanted or get it in the way I wanted it. Yes this cost me a decent penny to get this tracking program built, but it has paid for itself already several times over.
Take this example. I am running a campaign on yahoo search marketing and I was checking my program stats and noticed that I was seeing a lot of traffic from foreign countries and my whole account is set to US only.  So I dig thru my stats for Aug 1 thru 13 and find that anywhere from 10 to 25% is from foreign countries.  So I log into my Yahoo search marketing account and contact them letting them know what I am seeing and attach a report for just one of the days and state that I am seeing this on all days Aug 1 thru 13. A day later I get an email stating it has been escalated to their click fraud department and I should get an email in a few days. Two days later I get this email:

Our investigation concluded that your account experienced one or more occurrences of the following situations:

?        Unusual end user activity or behavior
?        System issues

As a result, we have issued an adjustment to your account in the amount of $X,XXX.XX. This adjustment should post to your account within three to four business days. You can view your billing history through the Reports section of your account by selecting the Billing Transaction Detail Report.

To protect the integrity of our systems, we unfortunately cannot provide you with the specific details associated with the identified pattern of behavior. We want to assure you that we are always working to improve the quality of the traffic delivered to advertisers and as such we are taking the appropriate steps to help prevent these types of activity from occurring again in the future. Our sophisticated Click Protection System runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week and is designed to prevent advertisers from being charged for certain clicks. However, there may be instances, such as this one, where we make additional adjustments to your account.

As you can see they don’t come out and say we agree with you that you received foreign traffic, they did offer me a nice credit. With that said I was making a profit on the campaign even with this amount of foreign traffic being sent. So the credit is just icing on the cake, but this is something that is deserved by me as I am paying for US traffic not foreign traffic. This is just one example of why you need to track your campaigns by a third party software that tracks IP addresses etc. to monitor it for foreign traffic or even click fraud that you are billed for.  One other instance you can read about is from PepperJam Search and their $10,000 “Goodwill Credit” .

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